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Angular 2 Upcoming Features and SemVer

23 January 2017

WRITTEN BY GARETH DUNNE @JSDIARIES

Whats New?

January has been a fairly quiet month regarding big notable Angular news. This is partly because a lot of revelations were revealed in November and December, highlighting the version changes of Angular3, and 4. Or more sensibly now called just plain Angular.

As of January 11th, Angular 2 switched back to an MIT open source license framework. While this has no bearing on any technical aspect of Angular, it does reassure developers how they can extend and modify Angular without any worries.

The Google Angular team actually prefers the Apache 2 license for scaffolding the legality of an Angular 2 project, but it was understood that the wider community has a better understanding of the MIT license.

While hardly a major cause for celebration, this is still a nice example of Angular reacting to community feedback. In short, a better recognized certification says you can happily publish your Angular applications without restrictions.

The Angular Material 2 beta has started, using the Angular CLI to install it. The beta provides high quality UI components using Angular 2 and TypeScript. These UI components are customizable within the Material Design specification. They also do not put a strain on the application by having low performance costs.

While Material Design definitely isn’t suited for everyone’s taste, its certainly nice to have the option as its neat, clean and has high usability Although, I think it limits creativity for UI designs to some extent.

In the context of an Angular 2 applications, functional design is incredibly important. If you value quick functional design over a design that has more visual fluidity and better creative processes, then you can’t go to far wrong implementing material design into it.

Heres some nice examples from the referenced sample application from the git.

A major release cycle schedule was announced, pinpointing the exact times where Angular are planning its forthcoming major releases.

Also you can check out a video detailing Angular 4 and version plans here.

A deprecation policy was also introduced so that any major releases that contain breaking changes to the API will automatically be notified well ahead of time.

If one had to guess of what a deprecation issue would look in the next major versions, then we could probably look back to when packages such as uibootstrap or ng-dialog from Angular 1 etc weren’t fully compatible with Angular 2. Similar forthcoming breakages might be comparable to these kind of previous issues.

It will be interesting to see how this effects the Angular job market, as there is plenty of Angular 1.x roles still available and probably will be for a very long time. In terms of maintaining projects and applications, many will still be developing on that version.

However, more Angular 2 positions are being listed everyday so it is likely that some previous features might be deprecated. This might accelerate the process of some companies adapting some of the latter versions.

One of our goals at JSdiaries is to bring Angular 2 developers together and provide them with valuable information and news from the JavaScript world.

As we grow, we hope to implement a job board that will have listings of some open Angular positions. Hopefully, this will connect potential employers with some of the developers from the JSdiaries community.